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Maggie Dixon Classic – a full day at MSG

Rutgers suffered it’s worst loss of the season, 79-50, to No. 8 Texas A & M in the first game of the Maggie Dixon Classic doubleheader at Madison Square Garden. The game was never competitive after the opening five minutes.

The Rutgers-Texas A & M matchup served as an undercard to one of the biggest events in women’s college basketball history — UConn’s 81-50 rout of No. 10 Ohio State. The win was the 88th straight for the Huskies, who tied the 1971-74 UCLA men’s basketball team for the longest winning streak in Division I college basketball history.

Here are the quotes from UConn coach Geno Auriemma, who, as usual, supplied some gems:

“You can put any spin you want on it and make it better, the same or less. One thing that’s non-negotiable is the one thing we have in common is that we settle for nothing less than the absolute best that we can give you every single night. And there are very few people that do that.”

“The reason that everybody is having a heart attack the last four or five days is that a

bunch of women are threatening to break a men’s record. Everybody is all up in arms about it. All the women are happy as hell about it and can’t wait to come in here and ask questions. All the guys that love women basketball are all excited and all the miserable bastards that follow men’s basketball and don’t want us to break the record are here because they’re pissed. That’s just the way it is. If we were breaking a women’s record, everybody would go, ‘Aren’t those girls nice? Let’s give them two paragraphs in USA Today. Let’s give them one line on the bottom of ESPN and send them back where they belong – in the kitchen. But because we’re breaking a men’s record, we’ve got a lot of people paying attention.”

“The motivator is if you lose, then you’re determined not to let that happen again. Well, if you win, what motivates you? And that’s something that comes from deep inside you and what you stand for.”

“We don’t have to lose on game day to know exactly what is winning and what is losing. We lose every day (in practice). We just don’t like to lose when people are watching.”

“I don’t think I’m doing anything that hasn’t already been done. I didn’t intvent something and I’m standing here telling you that I’m smarter than everyone else and I saw something that no one else saw and I should be held up there with Christopher Columbus. I didn’t find something that no one else knew existed.”

“It would be very difficult for me to write a book because I would have to say in my book all the stuff that I do that I stole from other people. Did you see all those layups we got today? Some of those backdoor cuts? Some of that really cool stuff that we’ve been doing? Get the tape, go break down and find out exactly what UCLA was running 37 years ago – and you’ll see the exact same stuff. We run their offense.”

“Things just happen to me. Things find me. Good things and bad things.”

“You’ve got to understand it’s very, very simple for me to stay grounded and stay where I am (because of) the guys I grew up with and my family. When I went into the stands after the game, my brother congratulated me and he put his arms around me and he said, ‘Yo, man, the Eagles kicked the (bleep) out of the Giants.’ Seriously, that’s kind of what’s important where we grew up. So we were all celebrating. We’ve got two things to celebrate tonight.”

“The only time I addressed it any differently than I have any other time was probably this week – just to let them know this is what’s happening, this is what’s going to happen, this is what it all means. You can’t hide from it. I like to remind my players all the time, ‘You don’t stumble and bumble into history. You don’t accidentally fall into the history books.’”

“Today, it was an opportunity for them to do something that everybody is going to remember, especially them. And especially the way they did it. That wasn’t an accident. That wasn’t we got lucky. That wasn’t one of those ‘They got a couple good calls or they made a couple lucky shots.’ The way it was done is what I was most impressed with.”

“I think why the comparisons might be accurate is that 30 years ago, no one had caught up to UCLA. For whatever reasons. And even after that winning streak, they still didn’t catch up. It takes a group effort to gang up on somebody. One or two or three schools deciding ‘We’re going to this,’ isn’t going to make it happen. It didn’t take one, two or three schools to all of a sudden knock UCLA back down to where everybody else was. It took an entire college mindset of ‘We want to really be good at men’s basketball.’ … It’s taken a little bit longer on the women’s side to do that. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. It’s just taking a little bit longer. Again, it’s women’s sport so people aren’t going to give it its due.”

About Ryan Dunleavy

Ryan Dunleavy has covered Rutgers athletics for more than a decade, dating back to his days as a student at his alma mater. He became New Jersey Press Media’s Rutgers women’s basketball beat writer in 2009 and Rutgers football beat writer in 2013. Since joining the staff in 2004, the Morris County native also has covered the NFL, MLB, NBA, the Somerset Patriots and high school sports.

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